Work Text:
When their respective crews head off in different directions to take care of whatever business they each have in Allport, Lizzie finally lets herself take a proper look at Jay Ferin.
She is adjusting the gun holster on her hip, shifting in her seat. Her body language says uncomfortable, but her eyes are piercing and calm, a hunter down to the pupils. Jay’s hair is lighter than Ava’s, her eyes darker, her manner less self assured but no less captivating.
They are far, far too similar.
Jay looks over and catches Lizzie staring, and Lizzie snaps her eyes forward, glad her skin is too dark to show the heat she can feel rising to her face. It’s ridiculous. Just another fucking Ferin, and suddenly she is twenty again, meeting Ava in the woods and hoping she couldn’t hear the racing of Lizzie’s heart when their sparring brought their chests together.
Lizzie shakes herself. This is not then, and Jay is not Ava.
“Walk with me,” she says suddenly, and after some dithering Jay agrees.
They end up at a tavern, and Lizzie says the first part of the pirate code that comes to her, consent.
“You picked that one today?” The bouncer asks with a laugh and a wink, and Lizzie is suddenly furious, angry that he would think that, angry that she can’t make herself hate the idea, angry that it can never, ever be like that for her ever again because the only person she has ever fallen in love with is dead at what might as well have been her hand.
Instead of killing the bouncer in cold blood, Lizzie takes a deep breath and steps inside. Jay follows her, and it is a good reminder that she is not Ava. Ava would have argued, would have fucked around, would have pushed her buttons until she was wound tighter than a rope in a storm. Jay just follows, and Lizzie’s grief feels so raw and real, so physical that she thinks for a second that it must show like a bullet wound to her heart.
She glances down. Her chest is, of course, not bleeding, and that makes her angry too.
She sits at the bar and taps the seat next to her. Jay goes easily, looking slightly nervous. She orders them both drinks. A lot of drinks.
“You’re gonna drink all of those?” Jay asks, and she asks it with Ava’s intonation, Ava’s scepticism, Ava’s goddamned dead fucking voice.
“I wanna have a conversation but I think I gotta be a little drunk to do it,” Lizzie replies.
They drink. They drink perhaps slightly more than is wise, and soon Lizzie’s vision is blurrier than she’d meant for it to get, and her head is spinning. It hurts less this way though, the wound feels like the scar it is instead of the ripped open scab that just being near Jay is making it, so she keeps drinking.
Lizzie’s thoughts swim away, too alcohol-swollen to be of much use or coherence. If she had any lucidity left, it would worry her, but as it is she just sits and watches.
Jay laughs, and Lizzie can’t help the smile that smears itself across her face in response, messy and too honest. Jay laughs just like Ava did. The same sound, the same movements, the same full body motion of it, like their mouths couldn’t contain their joy.
It feels like drinking with a ghost, a memory. It feels like her heart is being ripped out of her chest. It hurts more than almost anything she’s ever felt, and yet Lizzie hasn’t been this happy since that day on the beach.
Jay makes her feel like a person again, and she hates herself for it.
Jay giggles, almost falling off her chair, and Lizzie knows they are both far too drunk for this to be anything but incredibly dangerous.
“You can’t judge a book by its cover, right, especially when the book is all– blue and navy-like,” Jay mutters, waving the hand that isn’t around Lizzie’s shoulders.
“You just look so much like your sister,” Lizzie says before she can think about it, because it’s all she can think about.
“How- how did you know what my sister looks like?” Jay mumbles, head falling onto the counter as she squints up at Lizzie blearily.
“I- didn’t even know you had a sister,” Lizzie manages. The lie is bitter on her tongue, digging into her throat like knife points, but she forces it out anyway. It feels like a betrayal of Ava’s memory to deny knowing her. Sometimes Lizzie thinks Ava is the only thing she’s ever really known at all.
Chip is haunted by the Midnight Rose still, she can see that in him. It has become the tomb that his life revolves around, the mausoleum of memory that he is trapped in.
The Midnight Rose did not trap Lizzie. Even Shay had passed through her life without anchoring her, and her grief for all the Black Rose Pirates stays with her, rather than her staying stuck in the grave with them .
But Ava? Ava had been everything. Ava had been the spark Lizzie let herself catch fire from, the contagious burning of her heart threatening to kill them both.
Of course, in the end it had only killed one of them.
So yes, she knew that Jay had a sister. She had known Ava. More importantly, she had let Ava know her. Jay is still talking, something about the Navy and internal reform, and Lizzie scrambles for a response, letting her tongue go on autopilot.
“You’re already a pirate now, you’ve gone too deep!” Lizzie says, at once reminding herself and Jay of who Jay is. Not Navy, and not Ava.
“But if I beat them up hard enough,” Jay mutters, brow furrowed.
Lizzie smiles again, and her heart threatens to crawl up out of her mouth and lay itself at this woman’s feet. She looks at Jay and she sees Ava, she looks at Jay and she thinks, I could know you. In some ways I already do. You could even know me.
“What are you gonna do now that you have John back?” Jay asks, and Lizzie drifts on the tide of the conversation, her mouth running by itself. She’s rehashed their war plans so many times to so many people, has whispered them to herself at night when everything feels too dark and too heavy and the only thing keeping her in the world of the living is the idea of vengeance and closure. Even shitfaced and lovesick, even talking to this mirage, this reflection of the woman who took Lizzie’s heart six feet under when her own stopped beating, Lizzie can explain the Plan. The Strategy. The Goal, the one that has consumed her since Ava died.
“You have a good crew,” Jay says, and Lizzie nods vehemently.
“And you have Chip,” she responds, half disparaging and half strangely proud.
Jay puts her arm more firmly around Lizzie’s shoulders, tugs their heads close together again. Lizzie can feel Jay’s breath on her lips, and unbidden she thinks of the memories of Ava that she doesn’t let herself relive, the taste and smell of her, of the way they would fight to draw blood and then kiss until they couldn’t breathe. It had been so lethal, their love affair, constantly balanced on the edge of a knife, and it had been the truest thing Lizzie ever fully trusted.
She’s been talking without realising it for a while, something about where she got her ship, when Jay interrupts. “Lizzie,” she says, then frowns and purses her lips. “Liz-zie,” she sounds out again, grinning at the name.
It tugs at a long unused corner of Lizzie’s heart, all dust and corpses, and it sweeps some of the cobwebs away. She was never ‘Elizabeth’ with Ava either. Always Lizzie. With Jay, she can feel that same draw, that same addicting promise of being nothing but herself. It is too raw, and too familiar, and Lizzie is suddenly ashamed of herself with a burning passion that she channels into taking another long drink.
She cares hard and easily, her rough exterior protecting a heart so broken and vulnerable she is amazed that it still beats. But now Jay touches her and Lizzie’s heart leaps to meet it, and she feels like she is dying all over again.
Lizzie has been lying at rock bottom for years, has been simmering in the injustice of Ava’s death for long enough to forget what it felt like when she was alive.
But now Jay shakes her hair out of her face, and smiles, and Lizzie’s chest tightens, and she remembers.
It’s not her fault. Her love had gone down to the grave with Ava, had stayed there weeping for as long as it could manage. It sits in her chest now, undead and useless, painful and necessary, and it is so far out of Lizzie’s control that she wishes she could cut it out entirely, but that would be like losing Ava all over again and she can’t survive that a second time.
So the ghost of her love has made Jay a stand in, a replacement being asked to step into shoes that can never really be filled again, and Lizzie hates herself for it, but she can do nothing to stop it at all.
Jay is beautiful, and intelligent, and kind, and in another life Lizzie thinks they would have been great friends, in a more distant life, maybe even more than that. But this is neither of those lives.
In this life, Lizzie lies with ghosts. In this life, she chases her personhood in the form of another Ferin daughter, chases the feeling of humanity, chases something that is dead .
In this life, Lizzie falls for Jay for all the wrong reasons. She places herself center stage in the middle of yet another hopeless tragedy, only this time she does so willingly, because she has not been this happy, has not felt this human since Ava was alive and she would follow that feeling anywhere. In this life, Lizzie is just a person, just the way the Ferin sisters make her feel, and she cannot help herself. No one can help her.
In this life, none of them ever stood a chance.